Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium" - An Analysis of the 21st Century's Social and Political Landscape

Bill Weaver: There are moments reading this description of post-2008 political anxieties that it resembles a horror show, but how much of this is ‘horror’ and how much is ‘show’’? Certainly the realities of the ISIS terror-state were horrific enough as detailed in the last chapter added to the revised edition of this work first published in 2014. Dismantling the ISIS ‘caliphate’ is the rare example of an institutional or systemic success cited by the author and here I would have to agree the global system scored a win. Gurri’s discussion of Spain circa 2011 however offers more surreal than real horrors from the political system, particularly the bit about the “silent scream”. To illustrate, I’ll mention in passing that according to social systems theory, communication along with the attendant information (and redundancy) is essentially ‘society’, otherwise described as differentiated (modern) systems of communication such as law, politics, economy, art, science, religion etc. With the Spanish example you can clearly see the strong differentiation of the political system (which includes the street protests) from the legal system (which would include the specific...

United States on Aug 15, 2023

Joe: Considering that this book was written around the events of 2008 to 2014, albeit with a revision for 2016-17, it accurately fortells unfolding events of the 2020's.

The continuing alienation of the public in democracies and the crazed machinations of an inadequate little fantasist in Russia in 2022-23.

An further revision of the book is in order.

United Kingdom on Apr 21, 2023

M. O'Bryan: Originally released without much fanfare in 2014, this book got a second life in the early years of the Trump era, as word spread among legacy media types that it had predicted the rise of Trumpism. That led to this 2018 edition with the lengthy new chapter updating the book for the Trump era. The thesis that was credited for presciently envisioning things like Brexit and Trumpism is important, and while the reviews saying it's long-winded and not especially original have some merit, I think they're overblown. I haven't seen the thesis put forward with quite this level of clarity in any earlier books, even if similar ideas were in the air, and I actually appreciate that the first 4 - 5 chapters repeat the thesis through different historical iterations, which helps show its durability. Unfortunately, that still only carries you halfway into the book, at which point the author's libertarian ideology basically undermines the whole project.

To summarize the useful thesis: all societies are managed by an elite class who must control the flow of information from which people can build their explanatory narratives about the world and politics. In modern societies, this is a loose...

United States on Jan 27, 2023

Uta C. Groeschel: Gurri describes the nihilism of many popular movements from the Arab spring to Occupy Wall Street and locates their origins in the vast chasm between the expectations of the elites and their flawed performance.

Germany on Dec 06, 2021

Jean-Marc POTENTI: Ouvrage extrêmement pertinent et actuel...

France on Apr 30, 2021

Norman Macdonald: A detailed, yet thoroughly absorbing read. An insight into how the modern machinery of Global finance and politics works - or not!

United Kingdom on Feb 22, 2021

Carlos A. V. Silva: I know, you've heard hundreds of times that the Internet changed everything. But did you really dig what this means? Here you will find some really astonishing insights about the impact of the "fifth wave" on the relation between the networked public and the authority, and how this can affect democracy, capitalism, science. Everything.

Brazil on Jun 20, 2020